Soap UI

SoapUI is a brilliant tool for testing web services.  It can be downloaded from http://www.soapui.org/.

Property Transfers

SoapUI allows testing individual calls to a service but also allows multiple requests to be put together to form test cases.  For example, a test case creating and deleting would require the id generated by the first request to be passed to the delete request.  Soap UI's mechanism for doing this is with a Property Transfer.

    Right Click on the Test Steps -> Add Step -> Property Transfer

The transfer is done using XPath by default.  An example of a property transfer is below using the xml

CreateRequest
    <CreateRequest>
        <name>Andy</name>
        <data>123456</data>
    </CreateRequest>

CreateResponse
    <CreateResponse>
        <id>159</id>
        <name>Andy</name>
        <data>123456</data>
    </CreateResponse>

DeleteRequest
    <DeleteResponse>
        <id>159</id>
    </DeleteResponse>

Here the property transfer is between the CreateResponse and the DeleteRequest.  In SoapUI this will look like,

    Source: Create      Property: Response
    declare namespace myns='http://www.me.com/example';
    //myns:CreateResponse/id

    Target: Delete      Property: Request
    declare namespace myns='http://www.me.com/example';
    //myns:DeleteRequest/id

It is possible to include the whole <id>159</id> or to just transfer the value you can check the

    Transfer text content

Transfering a whole block of xml can be really powerful but the 'Transfer text content' does keep things simple and allows the transfer of the 'value' only.